Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

In this paper, the complex transformations of urban shopping morphologies are explored. Since the mid-twentieth century there are three clearly-identified shifts in urban retail development: the decay and revitalisation of the main street, the rise and fall of the suburban mall, and the fast expansion of big box retailing culminating in the emergence of power centre - a cluster of big boxes lining a central car park. These well-documented retail changes, however, are largely a tip of the iceberg, as there are much more transformations emerging from the synergy between different retail types. In the literature there are mainly two kinds of synergies, including ‘co-functioning’ where each type adds to the whole while remaining identifiably different, and ‘mutation’ in which one type learns from another and becomes more and more similar to it. A few examples involving more complex morphological transformations are categorised into the ‘complex synergy’. Our understanding of these retail synergies is at an early age when their urban forms are rarely investigated between multiple cities and the car-based retail type is largely excluded. These research gaps are tackled through a morphological typology of the synergies between the main street, suburban mall, and power centre, based on 100 cases worldwide. This typology reveals utterly complex spatial transformations of urban shopping: most cases (sixty-seven) unexpectedly fall into the ‘complex synergy’ bracket where they diverge into forty-two recombinant types. In sum, retail synergies are emergent properties where a wide range of morphological experiments flourish at multi-scales.